Macros
Preprocessing code through macros is not a new idea. It was, and probably still is, very popular for C and C++. In fact, if you take a look at some of the source code for the Gnu utilities for Linux they are written almost entirely in macros. Macros are notorious for being hard to understand and debug. For a time, newly-created languages like Java and C# did not support macros for exactly this reason.
That being said, even more recent languages like Rust and Julia have brought the idea of macros back. These languages were influenced by the macros from the Scheme language, a dialect of Lisp. The difference between C macros and Lisp/Scheme macros is that the C versions are textual while the Lisp/Scheme ones are structural. This means that ...
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